Sitename

Vitus Weh

The "Fiasko" at the table

About the sculptural work series "Demons 1-6"

The hippie movement once had the goal of overcoming barriers: both social and psychological. People experimented with drugs, with permissive sexuality, with new styles of music and trans-like dance. The fashion of colourful batic clothing is the most visually preserved example of this. It still tells oft the rich colours oft the LSD spheres and Goa nights, of the blurring of boundaries and of the beauty of do-it-yourself. Another attribute of that time, on the other hand, has almost disappeared: the wine bottle with candle and filigree-growing wax tinsel. It once stood on the tables of pubs and shared kitchens, its sediments testifying to long, "wild" nights. The classic basis for this were bast covered bottles from Chianti. In Italian they are called „fiasco“ („bulbous bottle“). They have a stable stand and let the wax run beautifully.

The facts that this word "fiasco" is at the same time a synonym for failure and flop seems to me, in its double connotation, to be very fitting for the small series of works "Demons 1-6" that Michael Vonbank produced in 1996. This unusual group includes six bottles wrapped in metal wire, over-molded with papier-maché into various monster masks, and painted with pastel acrylic paint. They were created for the entrance examination to Bruno Gironcoli´s sculpture class, to which Michael Vonbank was then admitted.

They are, as it were, the external genies of schnapps and wine, but at the same time sculptural "Passstuecke" loosely based on Franz West: similar to the way the artist Franz West once made neuroses "visible" with his plaster "Passstuecke", Vonbank traces collective fears of society and grosser excesses in his series "Demon 1-6". The fact that his fluid demons play so clearly with the fiasco form makes their function as "extensions of conciousness" even more striking.

This text was published in the catalog "Michael Vonbank. Demon Theatre. Works 1986 - 2015. An Overview" Edited by Beate Sprenger with texts by Christian Ludwig Attersee, Daniela Gregori, Lucas Gehrmann, Anton Herzl, Margareta Sandhofer, Beate Sprenger, Florian Steininger, Michael Vonbank and Vitus Weh. Verlag fuer moderne Kunst, Wien 2022 ISBN: 978-3-9035-7269-9